Cerber Ransomware Creates Self-Inflicted Canary Vaccine

Researchers Say Cerber Ransomware Now Has a Feature to Avoid Triggering "Canary Files"

The old canary-in-the-coal-mine and the new canary file serve the same purpose. Both are threat detectors: the former to detect the presence of poisonous gas in a mine, and the latter to detect an unauthorized presence in a file system. The canary file is particularly useful as an early-warning system for the presence of ransomware.

The concept is very simple. A bogus file designed to look like a prime ransomware target is strategically placed and watched by an anti-ransomware application. There is no valid reason for this file to be encrypted. If the watching anti-ransomware detects any attempt to do so, it knows that ransomware is present and can take the necessary action.

Cybereason researchers have discovered that the Cerber ransomware now includes a new feature to avoid triggering canary files. "To avoid encrypting canary files and triggering antiransomware programs," reports Uri Sternfield, Cybereason's lead researcher, "a new feature in Cerber now searches computers for any image file (.png, .bmp, .tiff, .jpg, etc.) and checks whether they are valid. Image files are commonly used as canary files. If a malformed image is found, Cerber skips the entire directory in which it is located and does not encrypt it."

This is typical of the continuous battle between any attacker and defender: measures and countermeasures. The canary file is a countermeasure -- evading canary files is a counter-countermeasure. But Sternfield points out that there is a potential weakness in the counter-countermeasure -- it effectively introduces a vaccine against this version of Cerber that can be used by anyone.

"While this trick might allow Cerber to evade some canary-file anti-ransomware solutions, it also makes it vulnerable," explains Sternfield; "a user can 'vaccinate' any important directory against Cerber by creating an invalid image file inside it, for example by copying any non-image file to this directory and renaming it to .jpg. Cerber will assume that the file is a canary file installed by an anti-ransomware program on the user's machine and refuse to encrypt it!"

Put simply, any valuable folder can be vaccinated by the inclusion of a malformed image file, such as a bogus .jpg. Cybereason's own free RansomFree product automatically does this, but it "only generates canary files in key locations and important folders," Sternfield told SecurityWeek.

Nevertheless, it is an easy process for any user. "Simply take any non-image file and rename it to .jpg, then copy this file into any folder which holds important documents. This has to be performed for each folder separately," he explained.

While this process can be used to protect valuable files from this version of Cerber, it would be wrong to treat it as a solution against ransomware in general. What the story really illustrates is the manner in which attackers and defenders closely watch each others' moves, always trying to outsmart the other.

Cybereason has already updated its own products to make use of the 'vaccine' in strategic folders. If the authors of this version of Cerber detect that the vaccine becomes an effective defense against their attack, they might simply drop their canary file detection process. At this point, the infected user will have to rely on the more traditional monitoring of canary files by an anti-ransomware product.

Cybereason raised $100 million in Series D funding in June 2017, which brought the total amount raised by the cyber attack detection firm to $189 million since its inception in 2012.

Kevin Townsend is a Senior Contributor at SecurityWeek. He has been writing about high tech issues since before the birth of Microsoft. For the last 15 years he has specialized in information security; and has had many thousands of articles published in dozens of different magazines – from The Times and the Financial Times to current and long-gone computer magazines.